AcreShield, a Des Moines-based startup founded to help farmers mitigate their financial risk by increasing yields, has raised more than $2.5 million in venture capital funding, the company recently announced.
According to a news release, AcreShield aims to address the yield gap, which is the difference between a crop’s potential yield and its actual yield.
AcreShield’s product Yield Optimizer provides AI-powered seed selection to help with greater yields. It uses independent seed performance data and provides farmers with guaranteed return on investment, AcreShield CEO Billy Rose said in the release.
“The net result is that farmers have better yield and financial performance, which is so needed with today’s low commodity prices, Rose said in a prepared statement. We’re solving a large farmer problem — the “Yield Gap,” by demystifying smarter seed selection with financial protection.”
Vertical Ventures, a West Des Moines-based venture capital firm investing in companies leveraging new and emerging technologies, was the lead investor in the round with co-investment from InnoVenture Iowa, Iowa’s publicly funded venture capital fund.
Vertical Ventures President Scott Stewart said the firm became the lead investor in the funding round for a few different reasons.
“First, AcreShield’s AI Ag Tech platform is up and running with a distributor network in place and with paying customers. It has demonstrated revenue success and is on track for rapid growth,” Stewart said in a prepared statement. “Second, because of its smarter seed selection model and the proprietary data set used, they can offer farmers a performance guarantee. Lastly, investors always have a foundational requirement in any investment — the team. The AcreShield team has proven to be consistently successful.”
InnoVenture Iowa Investment Director Kaylee Williams said the fund saw potential for AcreShield’s technology to disrupt the agriculture industry.
“Every row crop farmer faces the yield gap problem,” Williams said in the release. “AcreShield brings a truly innovative solution to solve the yield gap and, by doing so, is creating a 180-million-acre opportunity in the U.S. alone. This is something the industry has never seen before.”